Shortly before his last-place Twins played Game No. 127 of another lost season, general manager Terry Ryan was asked what he wanted to see over these final five weeks.

“The guys that come up, you’re looking for them to fit in and not look overmatched,” Ryan said before a 20-6 win over the Detroit Tigers on Friday night. “And the guys that are here, you’re looking for the arrow to point north.”

Rarely have the Twins looked better this season than they did in blasting the three-time defending American League Central champions. With four games scheduled in a span of 48 hours, they didn’t just bat around twice in putting up innings of six and nine runs.

They obliterated the Tigers’ bullpen with a minimum of 27 innings still to go on the weekend.

They also swung the pendulum in the other direction after going 20 innings without a run or an extra-base hit from Tuesday through the middle of Thursday’s win over Cleveland.

“That’s a once-in-a-season, probably once-in-a-couple-seasons type game for us,” said third baseman Trevor Plouffe. “We kept taking good at-bats. We didn’t give any away.”

Just as he has the past few Septembers, Ryan will be looking for signs of life as he considers another round of roster changes this offseason. Nights like Friday are a good way to stay in the Twins’ plans for 2015.

“If we lay down and look like we’re just playing out the string, that won’t be good,” Ryan said. “We’d better not do that. That would be the worst thing.

“You know the fans here are going to be looking for people that want to go out there and make it better. If we lay down, that ain’t going to make it better.”

A 20-hit Twins attack was the opposite of capitulation and eclipsed the previous top-scoring output for them this year: a 16-3 win at the Chicago White Sox on Aug. 3.

Shortstop Eduardo Escobar made up for two early errors with a career-high five hits, missing a cycle by a double.

Three other Twins homered, and four Twins drove in three or more runs during the staggering display.

Tigers infielder Andrew Romine was forced to pitch the bottom of the eighth. He became the first position player to pitch against the Twins since DeWayne Wise of the Chicago White Sox on Sept. 4, 2012.

Hours earlier, Ryan struck a typically no-nonsense tone in assessing a team trying to avoid a fourth straight season of 96 losses or more.

“We’re not doing well,” Ryan said. “We’ve got to do a better job as a baseball organization. I’m not pointing a finger at the manager or the pitching coach or the hitting coach. It’s all of us.”

A day after publicly stating that he planned to bring back manager Ron Gardenhire in 2015, Ryan made it clear he wasn’t stepping away from those remarks, even if they were premature.

“Nothing’s been determined,” Ryan said. “There are other factors in this, and one of them is my future. That would be a piece.”

The Pohlad family hasn’t signed off Ryan’s plan, the GM said, but the decision on whether to retain Gardenhire was left up to Ryan as a disappointing 2013 season drew to a close.

With Ryan still recovering from February surgery to remove a cancerous growth from his neck, he plans to wait until season’s end to announce his own plans. As he prepared to head to upstate New York to watch Triple-A Rochester for the next few days, he insisted he had not been beaten down by four straight years of losing.

“I’m not worn out by the lack of success,” he said. “It just drives you to want to get better and make better decisions and do the right thing. If there’s one thing that drives me here, it’s to give this fan base a reward for the patience that they’ve shown.”

In Year 5 at Target Field, the Twins entered Friday’s play with an average home attendance of 28,632. That ranked eighth in the American League and 19th in the majors, but it also placed them well ahead of contending clubs such as Seattle (25,028), Oakland (24,473), Kansas City (23,464), Cleveland (19,019) and Tampa Bay (18,120).

“We’ve drawn remarkably well under the circumstances here,” Ryan said. “That gives me more incentive to do right and to try to get it right.”

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